Manele Music Volume 1: A Rigorously Speculative Email Exchange
A conversation* between Ion Dumitrescu (Future Nuggets) and Paul Breazu (PARADAIZ) about manele, electronic music, Romania and unrevealing histories
*A shorter version of this text was published in the latest issue of Electronic Beats magazine.
Ion Dumitrescu: I was thinking to start with the “transition” period, between the so-called proto-manele and today’s manele. I know this is the epoch that you have investigated extensively; between the early nineties and the late nineties. I know you were reluctant to use the term proto-manele because of the variety of styles employed by the bands of this period. Especially after the 1989 revolution when literally hundreds of bands have sprung at the periphery of Romania’s cultural lore, forging a hybrid genre that is still poorly known. One of my first observation and (pseudo-)question is regarding the legitimacy of what I consider the two main traditions. First one, the Dan Armeanca legacy, the one that radically changed the lăutărie institution (together perhaps, but differently, with Nelu Vlad and Azur Band) introducing guitars, drums and even synths in the eighties. They also changed the lyrics, inventing a new folklore inspired by the life of the new proletariat, about the new “street life”.
The second one, what I would cautiously name the Albatros legacy. Minimal manele, the band reduced to three musicians, very basic orchestration and harmonies, a sort of minimal wave of lăutărie taking further the lyrical content to themes unapproachable in the eighties (e.g. obligatory military drafting). Of course I’m asking you to elaborate and add to this history, to talk about the transition. This is just an opening, feel free to digress in any direction. Of course, please contradict or distort my own take on this, if the case.
Paul Breazu: Yeah, that’s also my theory about the protohistory of manele music. But I want to be more specific. In my opinion there are a few sonic roots that meet the climax of the revolutionary manele-pop album made in 2000 by Adrian Copilul Minune and Costi (Ex-Valahia), Fără concurență. There we can talk about a boiling point in manele music culture, about a “before” and about an “after”. Let’s talk a bit about the “before”.
The famous Romanian ethnomusicologist Speranța Rădulescu said in an interview with the daily newspaper Jurnalul Național that this kind of music used to be played in Romania in the 19th century during the Ottoman occupation. In those times a manea song meant “a lamenting love song often sung by high society ladies, and also by their servants, the lăutari, a professional clan of Romani musicians”. Those songs are probably more similar to a theme/tune such as “Până când nu te iubeam” (circa 1956) by Maria Tănase than a manea performed in the 60s by the accordion player Victor Gore. The sixties are extremely important in the history of manele music — Electrecord, the one and only Romanian record label of that era had published numerous lăutari music records — Taraful Fraților Gore, Romica Puceanu, Gabi Luncă, Fărămiță Lambru, Marcel Budală, Dona Dumitru Siminică amongst them. I believe the M-word occured for the very first time in an official “document” on such a record. It was a 7-inch vinyl launched in 1966 and featuring the music performed by Victor Gore. The name of the song was “Maneaua florăreselor”.
The same musician had recorded at the end of the seventies another number, “Maneaua constănțenilor”, also on a 7-inch record.
As a curiosity, the song is paraphrased by Nicolae Răceanu on a quasi-famous “protomanea” titled “Magdalena” that mysteriously appeared on a 7-inch record in 1982 in the United States, where Răceanu emigrated.
His name doesn’t hit this page accidentally. A contemporary of Nelu Vlad and his legendary band Azur, Nicolae Răceanu had the merit of having built with this song a sonic reaction to the folklore music coined by the communist regime, represented in the inexhaustible TV program Tezaur folcloric. He was playing “dirty” by stealing bits of a classic manea song and singing, OMG!, about a sexual affair with a prostitute. The atmosphere is suspicious too — it’s a dangerous world out there, be it a peripheral or a problematic neighbourhood. On the album cover he is wearing a shirt that could convince one yes, that’s a Romanian all right ie, yet the right wrist is surrounded by a thick gold bracelet, a detail that could send one to jail in those times. And it was the beginning of the eighties, the most dystopic period of Ceaușescu’s political regime. Răceanu’s song is real, is urban, is from here and now, and has nothing in common with the over-dilligent traktors, the stubborn chastity of the village girls and the always green foxtail of the official folklore music. If you want, Răceanu’s “Magdalena” is a faithfull rearview mirror of “Bambina”, the fabulous song from 1999 of Adrian Copilul Minune.
For these reasons I would say that the grandfather of modern manele music — the manele music of the nineties — could be Nicolae Răceanu.
Meanwhile in the same Socialist Republic of Romania three bands were being established while Răceanu was recording “Magdalena”. Azur, Odeon, and Generic made use of an almost identical musical toolbox — guitars, keyboards, drums, bass — , and artistical inspiration. Although apparently they shared the same music policy with Răceanu, I think it’s not as simple as that. In their case I could almost see things in a functionalist paradigm: these bands were created to keep the system balanced. Surely they were born in synchronicity with the panbalcanic sound universe of the era — I’m talking here about times of empowerment for turbo folk, skiladiko, and arabesk genres — , but their function was to entertain working-class people. It was party music as music tailored for parties, it had no tradition, followed the formula, and had a lot of appeal. They were playing Romanian music, as well as Serbian, Greek, Turkish, Hindi or Tropical because working-class people parties imposed a playlist “with everything”. They weren’t bands of Romani lăutari but self-taught musicians belonging to the majority and in spite of some musical motifs in their songs, their relation with manele music is highly superficial.
Equally important in this matter is the name of Dan Armeanca. Another artist without a biography — media’s lack of interests in these musicians went hand in hand with a passive-aggressive racism of the Romanian society and the opinion-makers’ salivating obsession for the West — , Armeanca is credited per se as the inventor of modern manele music, a genre exploding in the nineties. Coming most likely from a family of Romani lăutari, he is a character surrounded by as many legends as Volumes he has released (13, without counting a record published by Eurostar in 1992; this kind of music was serialized not in albums bearing names, but in numbered Volumes). He is spoken of with huge respect in the world of manele music. As a resident of the infamous Calipso Restaurant in Bucharest in the years after the Revolution, he launched careers of important names such as Adrian Copilul Minune and Brandy, and brought an enduring Levant scent in the new school of manele music.
In that decade, Armeanca operated a radical change within the genre and built a very particular sound that you can feel it the music of bands such as Șobolanii din Ploiești, Gipsy Orient, Îngerii Negri and also those who followed, from his eternal admirer Adrian Copilul Minune — they recorded together quite a few albums during that era — to Sorinel Puștiu or Vali Vijelie. Dan Armeanca changed the sonic landscape of manele music and made a surprising reconnection: somehow you can taste in his music the sound of an old song named… “Magdalena”. (And because nothing is accidental in this world the percussionist in Dan Armeanca Band was Mircea Boroghină, a player who apparently had his part on “Magdalena”.)
In the same nineties, alongside Dan Armeanca, an entire generation of musicians was exploding onto the Romanian scene. A generation once again neglected by the media — I pause here to tell the story of an anthropologist who came in Romania beginning of the nineties to study what the so-called Oriental music; he gets to take an interview of the director of the public radio, asks him something about the afore mentioned genre, to which the director snaps irritated “That’s not music!” —, a generation who built its own production and distribution system with the micro recording studio, the cassette tapes culture and the market stall at its core. Albatros, with its dramatic lo-fi Casio melo-minimalism is part of this generation, as well as Real B, a band who breezily juggled in the league of etno-pop sprinkled with some Oriental lăutari juice. Or take Novomatic, a project split between amateurish new wave pop, Oriental & Romani music and tropicalia.
Even though back then all these bands were thrown in the same huge bucket of Oriental music, some of them have nothing to do with it. In my opinion, the “party music” bands — Adrian Schiop, an anthropologist who wrote a Ph D thesis on certain phenomenologies of manele music called them half jokingly “boy bands” — from the beginning of the nineties are similar to nowadays post-manele/manele-pop artists: their music is a Balkan, Western and Oriental blend. I have a problem, as you said, with terminology. I don’t know what the proto-manele music is, but I know what it isn’t. And I have another hunch. It could be that this modern manele universe to have, in its hazy protohistory, a sole source: Răceanu’s “Magdalena”. If I were to draw the trajectories of the manele-pop coming into being, they would be very entwined, yet not missing a thing from this story. What I find interesting in the decade you were talking about, the years of the post-communist transition, is the sudden disappearance — I’m not talking about physical disappearance here — of the so-called “Albatros generation”. Has this generation left any traces in recent manele music? Is there an Albatros influence on the nowadays manele? Is there a continuum in manele, to which this music bubble was part of or has it acted somewhere outside, leaving Dan Armeanca to work his magic alone?
Ion D: It becomes indeed highly speculative to trace a spotless history of manele, to draw a chronological path of the genre out of all these fragmented trajectories, blank biographies, legends, rumors and innuendos. I remember you once told me that at some point there were two bands Azur; the clone (let’s say Azur 2) playing the same tracks in the late eighties and early nineties, as a sort of undeclared tribute band concomitant to the original Azur, enjoying almost the same success, filling concert halls just like Nelu Vlad’s group. This is a pure Outernational anomaly, ambiguously accepted forgery. In general I know that in lack of copyright procedures bands were claiming different hits, because even though bands had their own repertoire they also had to play what was asked, the most popular tracks. I think hits like “Magdalena” or Azur’s “La o masă mai retrasă” were played by everyone, yet the origins of the songs triggered tensions and rivalry among the proto-protagonists.
But I’m all for rigorous speculation! It’s true that the newly brought
synthesizer with all its bossa nova, beguine and disco presets were
used to the maximum by bands like Generic, Azur, Tomis Jr., Zorile who
were as you said indifferent to style. At that time they were not
programming their synths but maybe for example Albatros had already “Oriental” sound cards or floppies, some sort of customized sound bank disks. I see this as one of the legacies of that period that is visible in today’s manele-pop or “system” manele (as they call today the manele standard of the past 15 years). Today all keyboards used in manele, like Korg Triton, Korg PA series, Roland G-800 and others, are all instantly equipped/updated with all the established sounds, beats and breaks that everybody uses. Every respectable manele keyboard musician has the Bulgarian sound banks, the Albanian ones, the folklore package, the Oriental digitized instruments (taken from Roland OR-49) or uploaded via computer. There are keyboard sounds made famous by incredible virtuosos like Amza from Bulgaria, and his Casio CZ-101 altered library. This Casio model itself became a reference to all key players of manele also due to its adjustable pitch bender.
Also another discrete connection or link in this discontinuum between eighties and noughties (after 2000, as you rightly marked the big change) would be the removal of acoustic drums. A whole generation used it, starting with Dan Armeanca that had a full eight members band in the nineties, and bands like Șobolanii din Ploiesti, Îngerii Negri that had classic drummers for years. Generic and Azur used both acoustic drums and at some point shifted towards drum machines.
In time keyboards’ drum machines took over the whole groove
section, unlike in Bulgaria where from acoustic drums they shifted to
electronic drums, with the cult of drummers growing almost
mythological (see Sasho Bikov). In Romania this shift happened also
for practical reasons, given that at weddings and parties while the
endless flow of requests are incoming in the soloist’s ear, the beat has to go on, the groove can never stop. This means sometimes that one track lasts for 10 minutes or even longer, while weddings lasts from12 to 24 hours. A physical drummer would not cope with this regime.
This professionalization around the synth capabilities lead to minimal
trios, another echo of Albatros generation, many bands today using
only 3 or 4 musicians: keyboard, percussion (usually rototum), violin or clarinet and of course the vocalist. The voice in Romanian manele is the most important instrument, everything was shrunk around the vocalist in stark contrast to Bulgarian manele were around weddings they have developed “Orkestras”; the Kuchek style is always played by bands or Orks comprised of (at least) eight musicians while vocalists are just guests, appearing for one or two tracks during the hours long sets of instrumental tracks.
In the nineties there were many short-lived hybrids and branches that disappeared. In a way this effort to blend with the mainstream pop leveled the whole genre in terms of production. Nevertheless I find numerous examples like “2 bani, 10 bani” of Cocoș de la Călărași, or “N-am cărți de credit” of Mihăiță Piticu’, that sound really different and sophisticated in
terms of arrangement and styles mixture. I should mention also Șușanu’s productions, really 2.0 mixing and mastering, standard international pop quality.
One my favorite, now long gone, ramifications of the nineties manele
was the disco-manele fusion that was put forward mainly by Dan
Armeanca and Adi Minune somewhere between 1993 and 1998. Few recordings examples survive today, mostly are on Trilulilu and
YouTube, but they are getting removed or they just disappeared. A perfect late example is “Amândouă femeile” by Adi Minune.
Yet I could venture and say that after 1998–1999 the prolet-gangsta, the petty thieves (șmenarii), the provincial wise-guys (șmecherii) were slowly replaced by big tycoons (barosanii), by modern boyars. After 2000 the money were now big and usually swirling to mafia bosses. The new wave semi-professional bands, the pseudo-boy bands were disappearing fast or moving to mainstream pop while the new middle class that emerged tried to quickly forget the socialist ghetto, the straight forward lyrics. Manele survived around weddings while the official Romanian culture still resisted assimilation. In the end the hip-hop and dance elements manele artists ingurgitated didn’t paved the way into mainstream albeit Florin Salam, after 2005, has made a great deal of collaborations with pop stars like Paula Selling, Delia and even competing in the National Selection for Eurovision. It’s a weird environment, where manele is both under and over-ground.
Paul B: Let’s go now to the “after” era. Regarding the so-called post-manele world that was created after the launch of Fără concurență, we have passed through other interesting and dystopian times, which might explain why manele-pop songs failed to reach the mainstream for a long time. In the last 15 years we have been witnessing the rise of the first anti-manele militants — for example, the writer and politician George Pruteanu. We have painted a frightening graffiti on Bucharest’s derelict walls, “Maneaua ucide!” / “Manele kills!” long before we put “Smoking kills!” on a cigarette pack. We keep forgetting about the media disinterest in this kind of music culture, apart from a tabloid point of view. We are signing online petitions on the banning of manele music in public spaces. We are noisily bursting out when Romeo Fantastick is invited by PARADAIZ, a community I’m part of dealing with the cultural periphery and cultural exchange, to perform in a regular club. It was easier for Florin Salam, the new king of the genre, to be broadcasted on BBC Radio 1 than to be heard on any mainstream radio or TV station in Romania. There is an active resistance and stigma applied to this music that cannot be dissociated from the passive-aggressive racism and discrimination inoculated deep within the dysfunctional Romanian society.
However in the last few years something has changed from both the public’s and performers’ perspective. Nowadays, Florin Salam & Co. make songs that quote Michael Jackson and Rihanna. The cultural disinhibition and relativism of the new generation comes filled with an increasing interest in musical areas kept at the margins by the cultural and political establishment’s policies. The manele music is brought under scrutiny today even if all these haven’t changed the things decisively. It could be the beginning of a reconciliation, a step towards normality. Manele music has left its own building. You can hear it in DJ sets played in “reputable” clubs and in the works of a new generation of music producers. Future Nuggets, the home of Steaua de Mare, Plevna, Raze de Soare, Ion din Dorobanți, stands at the forefront of this trend, alongside young music producers such as Huzur, Matteo Islandezu, and Florin Drăgușin. I myself am a bit reluctant to talk about a wave of new musicians dealing with manele music — as I can talk about the other side of the moon: the musical project Subcarpați gathered around it a movement that breathes a nationalist flavor and talks about the “real and eternal values” of the so-called authentic folklore. Ion, you are part of Future Nuggets collective and it would be interesting to know how this story is perceived from the inside.
Ion D: As I recently wrote briefly about this inability of manele stars to really become nationally accepted and radio aired, I would suggest a few more arguments adding to the valid ones that you articulated.
Starting with the new millennium, after the anarchic nineties, I think all industries and especially the club/party industry became more westernized, preparing to join the EU, learning the international ways. House and techno clubs emerged, events, festivals of different genres appeared. Ranging from drum’n’bass to hip-hop, forging niches from Romanian folklore to minimal techno ones. Pop music labels also started to make lots of money; it was a sort of escape from Outernational dynamics. My own take is that the manele world failed to step out of the wedding and family events landscape. Their position, surviving only at the mercy of contemporary boyars, was always of pseudo-stars. Manele musicians are still today at the bottom of the hierarchy. In a manele club, when Florin Salam (the King) steps on stage nobody cheers, nobody applauds. Wedding musicians’ wishes come always after the client’s wish, the club owner’s wish, the manager’s (Dan Bursuc) command. In clubs or at weddings they are subordinate to the crowd no matter how many millions of views one has on YouTube, no matter how famous they are. The client is above the lăutar, he gets excited only when he makes a requests and the vocalist sings to him personally. When one gives money one can enjoy.
It’s all about the people to whom they sing, the lyrics don’t represent the manele singer’s own feelings. I claim that in a way the manele stars are just vehicles, they have to become one with the person in front. They give voice to the “boss” fantasies, his status, needs, desires and sufferings.
The CD releases are usually ending up in gas stations or improvised shops (“gherete”) around the country; the whole manele pseudo-industry is pre-modern in a way. As I was saying in the introduction, YouTube is the stock market of manele, the true market of the genre.
So apart from the latent passive-aggressive racism that is still very present today we can talk also about an inability of “manelists” to socially mature, to become fully aware of their power as local stars. Besides failing to integrate in the normative market because of the the anti-manele position of a part of the society, the manele musicians themselves also missed the chance to address more often social, political or cultural problems in general or of their communities. With few exceptions the manele music scene failed to produce a zone totally disconnected from the mafia winners, from safe “Cântece de petrecere” (“Party Songs”) logic. They have yet to empower their communities and the margins of society which harbors them both, manele stars and poor people.
It’s true that in the past 4–5 years numerous attempts to normalize the relation with the manele genre were made, not without permanent explanations and diffused controversy. I always viewed Future Nuggets, besides being a label of self-assumed Romanian obscurities, as a bridge building facility. Locally between manele and other accepted alternative cultures, but also constructing a different channel between Outernational expressions and International industry. However, I have to say, always starting from being in love with the music before articulating something politically.
Among other players of this recent cultural transgression I have to mention Sillyconductor and of course the PARADAIZ collective, which you have co-founded. The PARADAIZ series of parties brought into the hip clubs of Bucharest manele bands from the nineties like Real B, Novomatic or Brandy, spreading manele through DJ sets at various events throughout Bucharest. The PARADAIZ TAPE MAȘINA is also an endeavor of deep tape excavation that might put some more dispersed light onto this ungraspable history of manele.
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A special thanks to Victor Plastic
